


streetlights in the mist

by Anonymous



Series: anon collection [1]
Category: Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Family Dynamics, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-28
Updated: 2021-01-28
Packaged: 2021-03-14 01:47:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29038881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Time moves funny when you’re grieving. One minute he’s staring at the casket, and the next minute it’s six months later with nothing to show for it.or, a series of vignettes on grief.
Relationships: Wilbur Soot & Technoblade
Series: anon collection [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2183256
Comments: 17
Kudos: 68
Collections: Anonymous





	streetlights in the mist

**Author's Note:**

> this is strangely personal but as oscar wilde put it, "man is least himself when he talks in his own person. give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth." hence why this is anonymous. 
> 
> based off the song [anyway](http://kerrigan-lowdermilk.com/songs/anyway) by kerrigan-lowdermilk. listen to my favorite cover of it [here.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agIcuTH_TKo&ab_channel=TylerCapa)
> 
> if any ccs state they're uncomfortable with fic i'll take this down.

There are so many things to be done after someone dies. There is the funeral home, needing you to pay for expenses. There is this question: should they be cremated or instead buried? Do you want their ashes turned into nourishment for a tree or a record player or all the other options, shuffled like a middle school music player, in front of his eyes? 

_No,_ he says, _none of those, just -_ and points vaguely to a model urn that stands above a mock fireplace. That will do. The people at the funeral home nod sympathetically. He is not anyone new to them. They see another grieving brother every day, every hour, every minute. 

He leaves with his head down. Why, he thinks, are gravestones so expensive? 

Then there’s the issue of cleaning. Because he shared a bathroom with him and a childhood bedroom, he has to clean out every nook and cranny of it, and each time he discovers more - shampoo bottles that were never thrown out. Boxes of cheap hair dye that went unused. Band-aids. A hair straightener from their twelve-year-old days. And in the bedroom, even more: frayed denim jeans. A carton of blue pens, all half used. Melatonin pills and a disposable camera. Only one of the pictures has been used. When he goes to print it out, it’s a picture of the streetlights shining red through the mist. Taken from the front window of their childhood home.

Wilbur Soot stares at it. 

He pockets the picture. 

And then he moves on.

-

Time moves funny when you’re grieving.

One minute he’s staring at the casket and the next minute it’s six months later with nothing to show for it. 

He laughs about it, because laughing is better than mourning. 

_Yesterday felt faster than my very pulse,_ he’ll say, if he had someone to say it to, _but this morning feels like a month ago._

The barista doesn’t care. They pass him his black coffee, one sugar, and turn away to the next customer. He stares at the back of their head and wonders if they know. 

Do they know that yesterday felt like the blink of an eye but today feels like he’s been living for decades? He can’t remember swathes of hours in the last month. He looks at old yearbooks and wonders how the time has gone. It feels like he closed his eyes for a moment and woke up ten years older. 

Then some days make time feel loopy, lethargic, stretched like taffy between his fingers, minute turning into what feels like hours. 

The sidewalk churns with noise. The coffee is acidic and sharp. 

Wilbur walks on alone.

-

When you’re underwater, the world is different. 

Everything moves slower, steadier. The world is muted, too. When Wilbur shouts for help, no one can hear him. He opens his eyes and it’s beautiful, nearly enough to help him forget that he can’t breathe like this.

The fish burble over him. He wonders if he’ll decompose like this - underneath the blue sea, underneath the sun, surrounded by coral. 

Then he blinks and realizes he’s not at the bay they visited as kids, on summer vacations, but instead in his bedroom. A water stain spreads across the corner of the ceiling. His eyes track it. 

It feels like he’s underwater a lot these days. 

He wakes up underwater. He brushes his teeth underwater. His chest grows tighter. He wants to scream, but -

No one hears him. _No one hears -_

Techno would have heard.

_Techno isn’t here,_ he reminds himself, _it’s time to move on._

He opens the window and stares out at the city street below and wonders how many of the people, miniature as ants, have lost a brother too. Or are they moving fine on their own? Do they know? 

Do any of them know? 

-

In the months before the accident - which is what Wilbur dubs it in his head, when he doesn’t want to think about the technicalities of it - he and Techno inexorably drifted apart. Something to do with work, or college, or the fact that their entire life they were Techno&Wilbur, no separation, no space between them. They went to classes together and were Techno&Wilbur, attached at the hip. They came home and they were Techno&Wilbur, always a whole, never a part. They went anywhere, did anything, met anyone, and it was always Techno&Wilbur. 

Then Techno broke the news to him, one afternoon. In the blunt way he always did things. He tossed an envelope onto Wilbur’s bed, and Wilbur stilled when he saw it.

College admissions stared him in the face.

He asked, _So you’re going?_

_Across the country,_ answered Techno. 

Wilbur stared at it. He didn’t feel very sad. He didn’t feel very much of anything at all.

Though, looking back at the memory, that might have been because he was upset. That’s the funny thing about memories - you only see them through rose-tinted glasses. You remember the good things and not the bad ones. Like the time Techno gave him his raincoat when Wilbur’s umbrella broke. Or the time he did Wilbur’s algebra homework for him. Or when he went out into the freezing cold as kids to find Wilbur’s good luck charm that he had dropped while walking home from school.

They never did find that lucky ten cent piece.

Wilbur doesn’t really remember the arguments, though. Those times when Techno called him a terrible brother and a shitty friend. And he doesn’t really think about those times - Tommy wide-eyed, Phil upset, the world shifting and collapsing.

But it doesn’t matter.

Because Techno went to the Midwest, and Wilbur stayed where he was, and it suddenly was a day later, a week, a month, and they hadn’t spoken a word to each other. 

Techno&Wilbur became Techno & Wilbur. 

Then there was the accident.

And then there was the funeral.

-

Wilbur wrote an elegy for him.

Those words never saw the light of day. They’re still in his journal, buried beneath a dozen other things - textbooks from middle high, childhood novels, old scraps, shoeboxes, hangers, cobwebs. One day he’ll need to clean them out. 

Wilbur spoke at his funeral but that elegy - the one born from something perverse inside him - was not spoken. Phil spoke too, and Tommy. 

Then all three of them sat in silence for a long, long time.

-

None of them expected Techno - _Techno -_ to be the first to go.

If anything, it should’ve been Wilbur. But those words feel too raw to say yet, and so he keeps them to himself. 

Because Techno’s entire joke was _Techno never dies. He never loses._ He won every game of Monopoly the four of them played. So surely he should have been the last to go. He should have been the one to make it the longest out of the four of them. 

But there was the slick road, a car, a truck grille. A hospital room. The burning lights of an ambulance. 

The thing is that when the doctor emerges from the room, face drawn and shadowed, you already know what they’re going to say. And you think about all the scenes in movies, what they show you: people sobbing, crying, clinging to each other, bursting out in fury, hurting themselves and others in their grief. You replay those scenes in your head and expect it to be similar.

What the movies don’t show you is the silence.

They don’t show you three brothers, sitting in a row against the wall, in silence. They don’t show you the stillness of it all. The confusion. Surely the doctor meant to say something else? Surely he didn’t mean to say _your brother died a few minutes ago._ Wilbur must have misheard.

But one moment his brother was breathing in the driver's seat, vivid and incandescent and blessedly alive, and the next moment the doctor in front of him was repeating, because none of the three of them had registered, _I’m sorry to tell you. We did the best that we could._

Tommy was the first to speak.

“Obviously not,” he said, “If you’d did the best you could, he’d be fucking alive!”

There was an argument. Tommy had always been explosive in his grief. 

Wilbur stared at the door the doctor had emerged from. Somewhere behind that was his brother.

He asked, fingers and lips and chest and body numb, _can I see him?_

The doctor, apologetic, said _yes, you can._

-

He doesn’t do anything different. 

That is the strangest part about grief. He doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t help or clean or pray. He doesn’t even cry. 

He only continues on with life. Buys new milk and eggs each week at the grocery store. Orders his four-dollar coffee each day. Takes the train to work at nine in the morning. Barely blinks. 

He wonders if Techno would have wanted this for him. To keep going.

Then again, Techno would have cried.

So Wilbur lies there at night, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars taped to his ceiling, trying to cry, and thinks, _it should have been me._

Techno would have cried. And Techno _never_ cried.

How broken _is_ he? 

-

The twenty five years Wilbur spent with him went by like a snap.

But the post-funeral meal at Phil’s house made time stretch like a rubber band, pulled taut. They were the longest hours. Talking and smiling and mourning with a dozen people who never knew him, not really. 

The thing no one tells you about funerals is that it’s not the funeral that’s dark, it’s the day after. You prepare for funerals. Look in the mirror and ensure your face is decent. You put makeup on to cover the dark circles and stand there, smiling, and shake people’s hands. Your family wears black and so does everyone else, and you mourn. You stand and mourn, and the sun beats down, and you’re cursing the fact that your tie is so tight because you almost feel like you’re choking.

Your mask doesn’t slip, though, because you have to continue onto the post-funeral. Where everyone comes up to you and apologizes, tells you how much they loved your brother, how sad they are he’s gone. How much they feel for you. Even if you can’t remember their names. 

And then the next morning comes, and no one is there.

No one tells you to prepare for the day after.

-

Phil asks him one afternoon, _how are you?_

Silence reigns. 

_I feel like I’m underwater,_ Wilbur wants to say, words peeling from his throat, stringing themselves in the air, _I can barely breathe, I’m underwater and alone, I’m hopeless, I never knew my bedroom could be this dark at night -_

He swallows. 

Looks up at the ceiling. The phone call hums distantly. 

“I’m doing alright,” he lies.

He wonders if Phil knows. If Phil can recognize the fact that he was gasping for air, gulping it down like it might be the last thing he ever tastes. 

But Phil doesn’t comment.

He only says, “I’m doing fine.”

They sit there in silence for the next thirty minutes. Neither of them have anything to say. 

-

He and Tommy still talk, because he’s Tommy, and Wilbur doesn’t think he could ignore him if he tried. Tommy calls him on Thursday afternoons when his seminar classes end and talks to Wilbur on the bus ride back to his apartment. Wilbur listens. And he sometimes responds, though Tommy doesn’t seem to care much if he does. 

“Wilbur,” he’ll say sometimes, “Tell me about your day.”

Wilbur stares at his socked feet, the wall of his bedroom, the mug of tea going cold. His entire room smells like jasmine.

“There’s not much to say,” Wilbur says.

The line goes silent.

“You doing alright?”

“I am.”

“Made any new friends at work?”

“Kind of.”

“One day you’ll tell me about them, right?”

“Sure thing.”

Wilbur is well versed at lying. It’s a skill he has perfected. 

Tommy says, “So I’ll talk to you next week?”

It’s always a question, like he fears Wilbur might say no.

“Of course,” Wilbur says.

He thinks about saying _I miss him_ and _how are you actually doing, without lying_ and _I made hot cocoa the other day, the same way he used to make it_ and _I’m underwater, the entire world is underwater, I’m screaming from underwater and no one can hear me_ and _fuck him, **fuck him for dying** _and -

The call hangs up.

Wilbur presses a hand to his chest and wishes a silent farewell to all the words he’ll never speak. 

-

He passes a picture of street art on his way to work, eight months to the day. He takes a picture and without thinking, goes to send it to Techno.

_This reminded me of you,_ he types, and hits send. 

There’s a delicate moment in between hitting send and the _Not Delivered!_ message in which everything is the same and the last eight months never happened

The moment is shattered when Wilbur remembers. He remembers wiping Techno’s phone and snapping the SIM card.

_Not Delivered!_ stares him in the face.

Techno will never see that street art. Wilbur will never get to show him something interesting again. 

_Oh,_ he thinks. 

He deletes the picture.

And then he keeps walking. 

**Author's Note:**

> comments and kudos are appreciated. take care.


End file.
